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In this new post, Justin Silverton shares a few helpful hints for creating high performance applications in PHP:use multi resultset queries to your database rather than many small onespage/object cachinggzip compressiontune your web serverDon't save performance testing for the end of the projectEach of the items has explanation and links to more details on them (including links to three difference object caching applications ion cube, alternative PHP cache, turck MMCache). |
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On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new tutorial covering the use of the Zend_Acl and Zend_Auth modules in the Zend Framework to create a simple user login and authentication system from Simon Mundy. After submitting the initial example of how Zend_Auth and Zend_Acl could be implemented Gavin pointed out areas that weren't really addressed in my proof of concept and it could potentially confuse newcomers to the way MVC is utilised. I'd like to clarify that post to a) Address those concerns and b) see if there's any constructive criticism of the process that could benefit everyone.He sets up the site layout (including where the actions lie) and defines some of the access rules the script will follow. From there, he creates a bootstrap file and an index.php to work with it. On top of this, he builds the key piece the Auth.php to handle the validation of the users. |
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Over on the SecurityFocus website, there's an interview posted with Stefan Esser of the HardenedPHP Project (as interviewed by Federico Biancuzzi. Federico Biancuzzi discussed with him how the PHP Security Response Team works, why he resigned from it, what features he plans to add to his own hardening patch, the interaction between Apache and PHP, the upcoming Month of PHP bugs initiative, and common mistakes in the design of wellknown applications such as WordPress.Some of the topics discussed includethe HardenedPHP ProjectSuhosinthe PHP Security Response Team (his role in it and why he left)PHP5's security focus versus PHP4'sand more...Check out the full interview to have all of your questions answered. |
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest PHP community poll as voted on by visitors to their site. The question for this poll asked developers what they thought, of the choices on the list, was the most common mistake that PHP developers make. Coming in at number one by an overwhelming lead was Not escaping entities and SQL input (a definite problem indeed) with the next highest option, Not using a Framework a full twenty percent lower. The next two options were closer (descending) Using old PHP versions and No or little use of Object Orientation. There's a new poll this week for your consideration this time asking which stage, of the five options, should come first in the development cycle of a typical content management system. Head on over and cast your vote today! |
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As mentioned over on the Zend Developer Zone, the IBM developerWorks website has posted a a new tutorial with a handholding guide to the creation of your own PEAR channels. This tutorial discusses channels, introduces and explains the channel.xml file, and demonstrates how to build a channel for distributing packages. Channels are ordinarily used to expose PEAR packages through the Internet, but enterprises can uses channels to make distribution of enterprisespecific PHP code easy.You'll need to log in to the IBM developerWorks website to get to the good stuff (you do have a login, don't you?), but once you do, you'll find a guide that goes through:what PEAR is and what PEAR channels arechannel management (including the channel.xml file)building the XMLRPC methodspublishing the channelinstalling and upgrading a test packageand some troubleshooting hints and further resources |
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On the Windows Skills blog, there's a new post that talks about the use of a SQLite database (via PHP) to handle the assault that Digg.com can dish out to a popular webiste. Physical memory was limited and Apache and MySQL soon started to fight for every remaining byte and eventually the page was unavailable.After this experience I started to look for a alternative for the database storage and I found an interesting one: SQLite.He mentions some of the features the database has including zeroconfiguration, a simple API, and the portability of having a single database in a single file. The next step was getting it to work with his Apache/PHP5 installation and to run some statistics on it. The results show SQLite pulling ahead of MySQL (INNODB) by a bit and MySQL (MYISAM) by a good bit. |
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On his blog today, Greg Beaver has introduced a new pecl extension to add the phar functionality into any PHP installation as easily as adding any other pecl functionality. After 14 months and nearly 200 commits, Marcus Borger and I have finished the first release of the phar extension in PECL. Phar provides both a stream wrapper (phar://) and a Phar class which can be used to access the contents of a phar archive. What is a phar archive? Think of it as a virtual filesystem that is customized for use with PHP, sort of like a Java .jar archive. Incidentally, the phar extension is a C implementation of the principles behind the PHP_Archive PEAR package.A beginners guide to installation and usage is included, showing how to configure your installation and create two simple packages one with a simple Hello world PHP script inside and the other grabbing the entire contents of a directory (and subdirectories) and pushing them in. |
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Ilia Alshanetsky posts today about the proposed Month of PHP bugs that Stefan Esser is proposing: It would be interesting to see what issues he discovers, hopefully most of them have already been reported to the PHP Security Team, in which case the upcoming 5.2.1 release will provide a resolution path for affected users.Hopefully, as Ilia states, the bugs will not turn out to be zeroday vulnerabilities and will instead be smaller issues. Either way, a bugfix patch will probably soon follow. Either way, I have to look at this as a free security audit of PHP by someone with a clue about security and ultimately, in the long run it will only make PHP better, even if March is going to be rather busy. |
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:Factorial and Euler Constant calculationOnly DomainMultiUser Tag CloudGzOutputJetDirectPHP SerialCitizen C2202PD Control ClassEnhanced QuickSortJSCaptchanDialogTab ClassmysqlFormHTML Graph makerEncoding Sessions |
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A good article to understand PHP Switch Statement |
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PHP Québec is pleased to announce the fifth edition of the PHP Québec Conference. The conference will take place in Montréal, Canada on March 141516th 2007. It features 2 days of technicals talks and an additional day of workshop. Among the speakers, the well know PHP experts such has: Rasmus Lerdorf, Andrei Zmievski, Derick Rethans, Ilia Alshanetsky, John Coggeshall, Damien Séguy, and many more. The conference has three distinct tracks : Advanced Techniques, Data Availability, PHP: Beyound Theory. With over 35 sessions and workshops, the PHP Qu.bec Conference is great opportunity to learn about the latest development and professional techniques to help you build high quality PHP software and meet with PHP. Special prices are available for all Open Source community members and major contributors. |
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Latest PECL Releases:Xdebug 2.0.0RC3 |
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On his blog today, Alexander Netkachev illustrates a concept behind the different thought frameworks like the Zend Framework spin on the idea of web applications. Web site developers are familiar with a concept that a site consists of pages but Zend Framework proposes Controller/Action idea. Undoubtedly, Controller/Action is cool but how is it relevant to real world tasks? In other words, how is Controller/Action connected to the standard form flow?His diagram shows the typical flow of an application and, below it, a sample PHP page that would handle the form results for such a layout. His question is what the Controller/Action method has over this typical format, and whether or not it just serves to make things more complex. |
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Richard Lord has posted some thoughts about why he likes one of his latest explorations the Zend Framework on his blog today. I've been researching the Zend Framework for PHP in relation to a project I'm working on and I have to say I'm now a fan of it. There's lots to like about it, and some to dislike about it too. But to me the best aspect of it is the flexibility it offers.He also mentions other reasons for liking it, including the simplicity of working his current application/workflow into the Framework's methods. There is one hit he mentions that the Framework team could improve on the documentation. |
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Derick Rethans briefly mentions on his blog today that he will be speaking at this year's Vancouver PHP Conference, giving his XDebug and eZ components talks. The Vancouver PHP Conference is one of my favourites because of it's nice atmosphere and stupidly low entrance fee that lowers the bar for attendees to come and visit. There is a whole bunch of interesting talks and I hope to see you in Vancouver!The Vancouver PHP Conference is happening February 12th and 13th at the UBC Downtown Campus and the entrance fee is $150 CDN (around $126 USD). Registration is still open so get over and reserve your spot today to hear great speakers like Derick, Andrei Zmievski, and Rasmus Lerdorf. |
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Matthew O'Phinney wonders about singletons. He wonders how he can make them more flexible than they even are by making entire custom singletons accessible later, after they've been created. This morning, I was wondering about how to extend a singleton class such that you could retrieve the new class when retrieving the singleton later. In particular, Zend_Controller_Front is a singleton, but what if I want to extend it later? A number of plugins in the Zend Framework, particularly view helpers and routing functionality, make use of the singleton; would I need to alter all of these later so I could make use of the new subclass?He gives two code examples to illustrate his point one that uses the current Zend_Controller_Front implementation to extend an instance and the other with a slightly modified version to do the same. The change is in the declaration of the $_instance value. By making it protected, the differently extended instance will be created. With the normal setting (private) you'll only ever get back the same default Zend_Controller_Front instance. Check out the comments for some other suggestions as well. |
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In a new post to his blog today, Felix Geisendorfer shares a method to make error handling in the CakePHP model functionality a bit more beautiful. Now I've written actions like the one above in the past as well. It's just that I've not had many MySql errors since I've switched to CakePHP. The Model class usually handles all the DB operations flawlessly and it's probably been over a year that I've written a custom MySql statement in my code somewhere. However, even CakePHP or, what's more likely, the database can fail or deny operations.He shows some code snippets of what he sees as less beautiful versions of database insertion code, methods that either don't check the response/errors or make a messy job of it. His solution works by returning the result into a switch statement to check the results and handling it there (versus a series of ifs). There's a class you'll need to make it work (Common), but he shows how to use it and creates a simple add example with it and a new Controller to handle the request. |
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In case you've missed it, the PHP community has been buzzing about a new set of mysql drivers created especially for PHP the mysqlnd driver set. The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for the libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd.Several bloggers have been talking about it, including:Lukas SmithSeveral posts from the Internet Super Hero blogYou can get complete information and download the software from the package's page over on the MySQL.com website (including some simple install instructions). |
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As the International PHP Maagzine reports today there's been a file inclusion vulnerability found (from Secunia) in the DreamStats package: Secunia's latest advisory points out a vulnerability in DreamStats, which could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands. This issue is due to an input validation error in the index.php script that does not validate the rootpath parameter, which could be exploited by remote attackers to include malicious PHP scripts and execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the web server.Those at risk are systems running versions 4.2 and prior and should update immediately. DreamStats is a package for displaying the statistics for Call of Duty related games on a website. |
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PierreAlain Joye is looking to clear up some confusion with his new blog post today surrounding the imagerotate function and some of its options: imagerotate has special intern functions when the rotation angle is a multiple of 90 degrees, it actually only flips the image. The operation is quite fast as it is a two nest loops with a little copy operation. However it looks like the manual has a little mistake in the function description, which can lead to confusion.The problem comes from a part mentioning the scaling down of an image to fit into the destination image. With a flip of 90 degrees, though, the resulting image contents will stay the same size as the original the image only flips, not really rotates. |
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